The average Maltese person drinks around 7 litres of pure alcohol in a year, according to BBC’s booze calculator.
On average, a single Maltese adult drinks 97 pints of beer, 109 glasses of wine and 190 shots of spirits in a single year, ranking Malta as the 78th heaviest drinking nation in the world.
The calculator yields some rather interesting unexpected results. The number one beer drinking country in the world is not Germany, Belgium and the UK, but Namibia, followed by Gabon, Romania, Lithuania and the Czech Republic.
The top 5 wine consuming countries are Portugal, France, Andorra, Denmark and Croatia. With regard to Spirits, the top consuming countries are Moldova, Grenada, Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan.
The calculator assumes that the average pint of beer is 5% alcohol by volume, that wine is typically 12% and served in 175ml glasses, and that spirits are 40% and served in single measures of 25ml.
The heaviest drinking country in the world is Belarus, with the average Belarussian consuming 17.5 litres of pure alcohol per year. The lightest drinking country is Kuwait, with the average person consuming 0.1 litres of alcohol per year.
Turning to popular alcohol by region, spirits clearly dominate the east, including Russia, China and India, where 770, 464 and 400 shots of spirits are consumed by a person each year.
Wine dominates the southern part of South America, as well as France, Italy and Portugal while beer tends to be popular in the US, UK and Germany.
Defined by the World Health Organisation, drinking heavily includes more than 7.5 units on a single occasion.
Drinking this much at least once a month "is associated with detrimental consequences even if the average level of alcohol consumption of the person concerned is relatively low", it says.
Survey data published by the WHO shows that around 40% of men drank heavily on at least one occasion prior to the survey compared with about 12%of women. The global average is 12.3% for men and 2.9% for women.
39% of those surveyed in Malta reported that they had not touched a drop of alcohol in the previous 12 months. The global average is 61.7%.
The WHO states that 3.3 million people per year die due to the harmful use of alcohol, this represents 5.9% of all deaths. It is also a casual factor in more than 200 diseases and injury conditions. Overall, 5.1% of the global burden of disease and injury is attributable to alcohol, as measured in disability- adjusted life years.